Update and Random Story Idea

This is an extremely loose story idea I had over the last week, week and a half or so. I’m not looking to drop LARPG and move over to this, this is just the first piece of writing I’ve done in over a month and I felt like I should probably get it out since it won’t leave me alone. My condition is feeling better. I don’t know what it’s going to be like when I sit down to work on prose yet, but I’m optimistic. I’m just waiting to get internet back before I dive back into the chapters I was working on. I may also need to take some time to reread all of the chapters I’ve done for volume two so far so I can get back into the headspace and remind myself of all the running jokes that might’ve lapsed my mind in the time since. I have a good memory, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Regarding Internet, we’re making the call to the company tomorrow morning and I will know when they plan to come over and install it after that. Also, ordering a birth certificate wasn’t as difficult as I was worried it would be so I should be able to get that verification thing finished before the deadline.

As for the story idea, I’m not fully sure where it came from. I’ve been juggling a bunch of different ideas because I’ve been scared I won’t feel like working on LARPG. I’m not scared about that anymore, not after the last few weeks have seen some major improvements to my state of mind, but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold onto this one and do something with it at some point.

I really like proxy/card battle stuff and this premise would lead to more lewd scenes than LARPG currently has which I really miss writing. I don’t know why I thought of a card battling thing when I’ve been in a void getting high for the last month, but it happened so whatever.

Apologies if you take the time to read this- this document is essentially just me ranting into the Notes tab on my iPad with dictation turned on so there are errors all over the place, and in addition to that, I jumped around the document going back and adding different thoughts haphazardly, there might be some repetitive information and it certainly isn’t well structured.

No terms/phrases are final.

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The main character is young, 18 or 20. He should be your typical card battling hero sort of guy, who has his head totally focused on becoming a summoner. Toying around with the idea of him having a missing older brother who was an upcoming summoner. He left the main character most of the stuff he would need to become a summoner but not all of it. I’m thinking that you need several pieces of equipment. A dueling glove, a folio to hold all of your summons, a magic glasses thing which I will explain later, and a deck box. Even more so than all that, you need resources that aren’t readily available to the average person in this world. 

Summoners enter into the various different astral planes through meditation and in order to get to the different planes you have to have burnable resources. Not specifically ones that need to be put on fire but magical things that are drained upon use. That makes it so costly, as every different astral plane has different resources to take you there. You have to have the natural talent to break through, and even then it’s not enough. You have to adventure around in your astral body looking for spirits, solving their problems, and doing whatever you can to gain their trust before they will enter into a contract with you.

Spirits will come in at least two types, deck leaders and minions. Better names to be determined. Leaders are the main focus. Like in Pokémon the goal of the battle between summoners is to defeat all of the leaders in the other players deck. Leaders are often but not always totally sentient beings and the difference between them and minions is often night and day they have much more defined personalities, and a much higher ceiling for growth. All spirits can be trained to become stronger than their base forms but leaders are the main focus as I already said I’ll need to work out more on their mechanics if I actually do this story. I think they would have natural abilities and then to make things more exciting bonding with them would unlock card like abilities when they are played. Minions and spell cards are drawn from a deck but leaders can be summoned at any time. Usually there’s only one or two on a field, and you build their deck around them.

Speaking of spell cards, my idea is that summoners channel the magical energy of the different astral planes into reusable spells. It takes time to craft these, and the deeper trance you are in or the more power you pull into them the stronger the spell is. Unlike monsters which are much more individualistic and subject to change, spell cards are recognized and documented.

Battles are performed on a table which supplements the users energy, allowing them to draw on their powers without actually being in the astral planes. The mark of a powerful summoner is that they don’t need these tables to summon their monsters into the real world. Naturally the battles are the biggest part of society, and summoners essentially rule this civilization so high-ranking people are accompanied by their summons. Low ranking people mostly just have chibified versions of their summons at best. The tables are not huge when you’re just starting out. It summons miniature versions of your spirits so they can do battle like a tabletop scale game. of course high-ranking battles don’t need the tables and they just battle full scale in huge arenas.

Some more ideas about the world. I’m thinking that it’s somewhat high-tech magically speaking. Energy is extracted from summoned spirits and treasures to power the world and everything in life relies on it. The different types of energy power different things. Energy can be created by summons channeling their power into reusable crystals or by filling similar crystals with the energy of the different planes you visit. Ice energy goes into freezing things, and so on.

Going more into detail about the setting, I felt it would be interesting if it takes place in a giant floating city that is shielded from the void on all sides. Long ago this city used to be part of some generic fantasy world. There aren’t too many records from that time. Some say there used to be other types of magic that didn’t involve cards and summons, but eventually they got tired of living in their original world and reverse summoned themselves elsewhere. There would be multiple other floating cities as well as large floating islands where agriculture flourishes, ones where wildlife and fish are grown, etc.

Let’s talk more about going into the astral planes. My idea is that when you’re just starting out you are essentially a ghostly projection of yourself. You still feel things, but you’re ghostly and glowing and translucent. The strong you are, the more physically real your presence is. Like I said before, there are many different astral planes to visit. By default, the main is just your generic purple void astral plain where the stars and cosmological creatures are- this place literally surrounds the setting on all sides and it’s held back by a magical shield. I’m sure there is a good plotline there about the shield eventually cracking and the void starting to seep in, but that’s getting off-topic.

This is where summoners ended up if they just use standard astralite to get into their trance. It’s typically considered the safest plane so long as you stick to the shallows. Most new summoners get their start here and create pacts with weak star themed monsters. Unless energy of a different plane is readily available to you.

My thoughts were that the main character would have his first leader be a rare star born type of girl with the rare ability to transport things back to him in the real world. Naturally this gives him a huge edge up on other summoners by allowing him to play catch-up. He’ll have access to treasures. Perhaps each plane has three different instances. The shallows, the deep, and the abyss. Not the actual names, just the meaning. Levels would be another way to put it. The more resources you put into it, the deeper you’ll go. The deeper you go, the stronger the spirits and magic spells you can create from the plane are. Not fully set in stone. Spirits from lower levels can naturally become as strong as deeper ones if enough time was put into them. More exciting that way, but powerful ones are still exciting.

The way to deepen a bond with your spirit is as you expect. Do things for them, give them offerings, create actual relationships with them, and so on. Most of the sex comes from here, as many of his monsters will form a growing harem in addition to the girls he bonds with in real life. Some humans and spirits can breed with each other but only extremely powerful summoners can actually create offspring with their spirits. I don’t want to mess with that too much right now, I’m just saying it’s part of the setting. These half breeds are naturally idolized in the society since they have immense natural born talent in the summoning arts.

I think that part of it would be called giving over essence or something like that. Summon creatures and spirits will want to be given power from the souls of their summoner. This is done through abstract means typically, like cutting open the finger while in the astral plane and offering essence. This is where some of the sex stuff can come in as offering essence through that manner is very potent. 

I have the thought that it would be interesting if he was paraplegic to some degree. It would tie into his character backstory, as I plan for his dueling style to be focused on taking risks and making gambles. He would start off hesitant to do so because of his childhood accident where he bet his brother he could climb a tree. It didn’t go well And it left him meek and risk adverse. He has a magical chair which his brother bought him from his income as a summoner. This chair has several modes. A standard wheelchair, a standing one, and leg braces which allow him to walk for a while although it’s painful. It is powered through the same energy everything else is, so he has to spend a lot to keep himself mobile at the start of the story. This is keeping him from becoming a summoner.

Also, it’s probably exclusively leg damage and not spine. I want him capable of some level of sex outside of the astral plane.

His brother disappeared when he was 14 and he started work a year after that. At the start of the story he works at a processing facility where big chunks of astralite or whatever it’s called is processed. Using his soul energy he and the other factory workers split them apart and process them into small, sellable chunks. Because he’s been doing it for so long it means that he has a pretty good handle on controlling his soul, which will give him a leg up when he actually starts his adventures. I’m thinking after his call to action that he makes the decision to take a risk and steal some of these crystals, doing so in a way that frames an asshole coworker somehow so that he doesn’t get caught. This is what helps him finally enter the astral plane.

After some more thought I don’t believe he will steal the crystals, instead the risk that he takes will be going without the healing crystals that go into his wheelchair for a month. They cost a lot and relieve his pain, so he’ll push himself to work hard without them and afford a big thing of astralite. it’ll make him more likable and show how risky he’s willing to get.

As for what his call to action is, I’m thinking that most of his free time is spent at a local summoner facility kind of like a game shop. These would be scattered all over the city, though he lives in a rougher part of the world so his isn’t all that big. They are also kind of like community centers because people love to come and watch and place bets on the summoners who show up. He has a few friends here, and getting to watch the matches is what gives his life purpose.

One of these friends I’m thinking is a jaded, cynical woman in her early 30s who is practically always drunk. The right side of her body is super fucked up somehow, and she used to be a talented and popular high-ranking summoner. There was some accident in the astral plane that ended her career and now she’s like this. I’m thinking she lost two of her limbs and without those parts of her body she can’t efficiently channel her soul and it made Her unable to wield most of her power, effectively cutting off access to most of her most powerful summons. The condition might be more serious than that, like her network of soul energy or whatever the fuck is all twisted and tangled so she can only play matches with very low level cards and summons.

They get along well because of their mutual disabilities, constantly making jokes at each other’s expense. She is who pushes him to make a change in his life. She knows that he has really good insight because of them sitting around watching matches together in the card hall. She thinks he would make a great summoner and it’s not like he doesn’t want to be one. She plants the idea of stealing into his head and tells him to take a risk for once in his life, Which somehow gets through to him. 

The older woman will essentially become his disgruntled mentor after he does the thing and winds up with a rare summon during his first dive or whatever you call it. She knew he had potential but seeing him succeed off the bat gets her going and after a little internal debating She’ll take him under her wing and provide resources and advice for him so he can quit his job. She has a lot of money and the only thing she spends it on is alcohol, so she might as well. The protagonist will be hesitant about this but ultimately caves in. Being a summoner is really expensive when you’re just starting off and he takes the help she offers. Yes, she could’ve helped him before, but she didn’t have that spark until he actually did something for himself. I also plan for her to make the most of their arrangement, teasing him by calling herself his sugar mommy and so on.

At some point she will develop that part of their relationship into something more concrete, especially because she teases him in her teaching that getting off before going into your trance or even better finishing right as your mind falls into the trance leads to a more powerful one. She doesn’t volunteer herself to help, not at first, anyway, but it will be fun.

She has a big house including a special room called a sanctum which is highly valued by summoners. These are like special meditation rooms with tiles lined by expensive materials which not only increase one’s connection to the astral plane but at higher levels allows you to bring a part of it into the real world. By that I mean you can physically interact with your summons inside of sanctums and move your body around freely as if you were in the astral realm. You still have to actually be strong enough to use a sanctum to its fullest ability though its still something.

The first astral plane beyond the basic one that the protagonist accesses is going to be themed around fantasy adventuring, something like ‘The Glade of Heroes’ where you’d find goblins, slimes, and other basic DND type things alongside spirits called hero souls. In this realm you would walk around until you find random quest boards that are scattered throughout the place which lead to points of interest. I believe his mentor used to specialize in hero soul cards, along with a few other archetypes I have in mind, and how he would be able to access the place.

Sidenote. The astral planes are all incredibly loose places. Being inside them is like being in a dream- nothing totally makes sense and things can change when you’re not looking or even when you are. They aren’t ‘real’ places strictly speaking. They’re fluid. Maybe there are a few actual landmarks by the spaces in between these places are never the same. Additionally, it takes strong willpower to navigate these places without getting lost. You need to have a clear focus on what you’re looking to get out of your time in an astral plane. If you’re looking for monsters to add to your deck, you need to be thinking about monsters, if you’re looking for treasure, that needs to be what you’re thinking about, and so on. The planes have a way of guiding people toward what they want to find.

Another sidenote. I mentioned that magic glasses kind of like a scouter from Dragon Ball Would be part of the equipment you need to be a summoner. These are especially helpful in navigating the astral planes because they display litRPG notifications such as scanning treasures and displaying monster info. In actual summoner battles this would be the excuse to include text without having to have a character explain everything every single time.

Back on the glade, I have ideas for 3 leader girls who he’d get from here. The first would be a slime girl who he raises up from being a puddle and is surprised when she turns out not to be a minion but a leader. She’s very cute yet strangely ambitious for someone so seemingly simple minded. The second would be a goblin chief girl who after helping her with whatever would proclaim him her husband and after learning that summoners can’t impregnate their spirits unless they’re super strong that becomes her goal, helping him become that strong. Lastly I had an idea for a cute dragon girl. The protagonist would run into a group of hero souls, dragon hunters, and at first he is excited at the prospect of catching one of these guys when they offer to become minions if he helps them hunt a newly hatched dragon. There would be a subversion at the climax of this little plot line where the newly hatched dragon turns out to be a cute, petite, shy girl who wears her eggshell as a bikini. He’s left with no choice but to turn on the dragon hunters and she would become another one of his leaders.

His early deck would be a mix of these adventuring monsters as well as stuff from the basic astral plane, like stardust monsters, comet monsters, and so on. He wouldn’t have one single specialization as the story goes on, I’d want him to use lots of different monsters and lots of different decks. As I mentioned, his main thing is that he gets wild ideas that are really risky and he pulls them off by the skin of his teeth. When he starts become a public figure, people get the idea that he’s unhinged, some even think he’s pushing his monsters too far but the only reason he was able to get them to go along with his ideas because he’s so close to them.

I think it would be pretty funny if it’s unnatural how often female spirits are drawn to him and that’s another thing that the public would fixate on about him as he becomes more and more famous as a summoner. I should probably say that in this world high-ranking summoners are all celebrities, though that’s par for the course in stories like this. The higher he rises through the rankings, the more eyes will be on him. The more attention he will get, too.

Powerful summoners are incentivized to have lots of children as magical power is passed down more often than not through bloodlines. Perhaps there could be trouble on the horizon as gifted people are being born in the current age. This means there are many noble houses with long lines of summoners and tons of resources to give their progeny. I believe that they are running through line with the nobility would be a belief that too many commoners are expressing interest in becoming summoners, and that’s another reason why the price summoning is so high. They look down on the common folk and don’t want them to become able to overthrow them, but they are kind of shooting themselves in the foot since making the barriers entry so expensive means there are less summoners and people who have low talent don’t get the chance to train up their skills and become better over time. Although I don’t think the problem is that there are less summoners, it’s that the big houses aren’t producing high tier summoner after high tier summoner. I don’t know, this part of the document is just me going off on a tangent and sounding out ideas.

One of the main characters I had in mind would be a reject from one of these noble houses who frequents the crappy card hall the protagonist does. She’s a creepy little weirdo from a house that specializes in insect monsters. Not the most powerful already, and even by their standards she is super weak. He might start off with a minor crush on her, to which his older mentor and some of his spirits would be like really? Her? But he’s attracted to how hard she works. I think after a point her family would unofficially disown her and she would no longer have the resources they provided.

This girl might be another stray he convinces his mentor to invest in and they would grow close as he encourages her to come out of her shell. A random idea I had that would be cute is if they travel to the bug realm she frequents hoping to get this really powerful insect queen monster or something and that plot line would resolve with her not getting that queen but instead the two of them getting two of her eggs, which with enough training would become a butterfly girl for him and a moth girl for her.

She’s definitely a creepy weirdo type girl big round glasses, shaggy hair covering her eyes, but deeply passionate and loyal once you get to know her. Mentor would probably jokingly prod them into doing lewd things together when they are using the sanctum at the same time.

Another idea I have for an IRL love interest would be his card hall’s cute and plucky commentator girl. Commentators are idols in this world and she is super nice and friendly but very disappointed with her her current lot in life. As stated, this card hall is a really shitty one and she would be stationed there with not a lot of chances to prove she deserves to be out there in the world doing bigger and better event coverages. They would know each other at the start and a funny idea I had was that when his slime girl first takes on a human form for him she reads his emotion because of their bond and takes a very similar form to this girl which would lead to some confusion and some explaining to do. The slime does it because she knows he would like it. I think it would be cute if he promises her to have tons of exciting matches for her to commentate and help boost her career along with his. She would not be a summoner, she doesn’t have the gift for it, but she would be his biggest cheerleader and would have to try hard not to show it when she is commentating his matches.

Switching gears here, let’s talk more about the combat mechanics. Again I want to stress that it’s more like Pokémon than an actual TCG. I’d be designing cards to make interesting stories, not for an actual game. The way I see it is that you have your deck full of minions and spells and then your leaders can be summoned at any time. There will be different formats, but the goal is to defeats all enemy leaders. Although the summoners take turns going back-and-forth, the summoned spirits battle in real time. This means that the summoner can give orders even when it’s not their turn, and their main role is to serve as their support and tactician.

Monsters will have two values, attack and health. Self-explanatory. Clean hits will take the total and subtract it from the health. This will all have slight litRPG mechanics- monsters will grow stronger the more they fight, they have the potential to evolve into new forms and as their bond with their master grow they will unlock special synergy skills. An example I have in mind is the starborn girl, who after further bonding would unlock an ability to create wormholes to other parts of the game board, allowing herself to escape more easily, transport allies to specific targets, and so on.

Spell cards would be just as an important part of the game as monsters, and they should be equally self-explanatory. We would see all kinds of things like one and done effects, convoluted shit, summonable constructs, effects to change the terrain, and more. I’ll have to list out all the different categories I can think of if I move forward with this as well as determine the actual flow of the game. I wouldn’t want it to be overly complicated, so it would probably be something simple like the player draws, they can play either a leader or a minion once per return, and can do whatever they want regarding spells.

Actually, no. I think there needs to be an expendable resource. Since every character will be wearing gloves anyway, I think it would be cool to have a spot on these gloves that indicates how much current points they have. I don’t want to call it mana but let’s say there are 10 dull crystals attached to the glove’s cuff and they glow With however many they have at that current time. Whether this resource is set and recovers every return is something I’ll have to figure out eventually, but then cards can have costs and that would help with the mechanics of writing it. That way characters will have to choose between using synergy skills or spells every turn.

I should also mention that leader spirits are not part of the main deck. They are separate, and can be summoned at any time but you always have to have one on the field at all times. I think the most common type of battle would be three versus three whereas full scale event matches would be six versus six. This leads to tension because even if you know your opponent and the type of monsters they work with you can’t be sure which of their leaders they will actually pick, and they may have different deck combinations for the variations of leaders.

The main loop of the story would be training the monsters he has, delving into new astral planes to get new cards, and taking part in IRL matches and tournaments to move up through the rankings. Of course I’m sure there’d be room to fit in evil plots, villains and over the top threats like you’d see in Yugioh. Feel free to let me know your thoughts!